The grounding and sharing of symbols

The double function of language, as a social/communicative means, and as an individual/cognitive capability, derives from its fundamental property that allows us to internally re-represent the world we live in. This is possible through the mechanism of symbol grounding, i.e., the ability to associate entities and states in the external and internal world with internal categorical representations. The symbol grounding mechanism, as language, has both an individual and a social component. The individual component, called the “Physical Symbol Grounding”, refers to the ability of each individual to create an intrinsic link between world entities and internal categorical representations. The social component, called “Social Symbol Grounding”, refers to the collective negotiation for the selection of shared symbols (words) and their grounded meanings. The paper discusses these two aspects of symbol grounding in relation to distributed cognition, using examples from cognitive modeling research on grounded agents and robots.

[1]  T. Zentall,et al.  Categorical shape and color coding by pigeons. , 1986, Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes.

[2]  S. Garrod,et al.  Saying what you mean in dialogue: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination , 1987, Cognition.

[3]  S. Harnad.  Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition , 1990 .

[4]  John R. Searle,et al.  Minds, brains, and programs , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[5]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  GROUNDING SYMBOLS IN THE ANALOG WORLD WITH NEURAL NETS A Hybrid Model , 1993 .

[6]  Robert L. Goldstone.  Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[7]  W. Labov.  Principles Of Linguistic Change , 1994 .

[8]  Risto Miikkulainen,et al.  Integrated connectionist models: building AI systems on subsymbolic foundations , 1994, Proceedings Sixth International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence. TAI 94.

[9]  S. Hanson,et al.  Learned Categorical Perception in Neural Nets: Implications for Symbol Grounding , 1995 .

[10]  E. Wisniewski.  When concepts combine , 1997, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[11]  B. Meek.  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , 1998 .

[12]  S. Levinson,et al.  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , 1991, Current Anthropology.

[13]  Domenico Parisi,et al.  Simulating the Evolution of Artifacts , 1999, ECAL.

[14]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Whither structured representation? , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[15]  S. Blackmore.  The Meme Machine , 1999 .

[16]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  From robotic toil to symbolic theft: Grounding transfer from entry-level to higher-level categories1 , 2000, Connect. Sci..

[17]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  The Adaptive Advantage of Symbolic Theft Over Sensorimotor Toil: Grounding Language in Perceptual Categories , 2001 .

[18]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  Evolution of communication and language using signals, symbols, and words , 2001, IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput..

[19]  Stephen C. Levinson,et al.  Language acquisition and conceptual development: Relational concepts in form–function mapping , 2001 .

[20]  David Lightfoot,et al.  Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach , 2002 .

[21]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  Learning and the Evolution of Language: The Role of Cultural Variation and Learning Costs in the Baldwin Effect , 2002, Artificial Life.

[22]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  Simulating the Evolution of Language , 2002, Springer London.

[23]  Nicolas Fay,et al.  The Emergence and Evolution of Graphical Productions , 2003, JSAI Workshops.

[24]  M. Pickering,et al.  Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[25]  G. Vigliocco,et al.  Language in mind , 2004 .

[26]  A. Cangelosi,et al.  The processing of verbs and nouns in neural networks: Insights from synthetic brain imaging , 2004, Brain and Language.

[27]  Julian M. Pine,et al.  Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. , 2004 .

[28]  Domenico Parisi,et al.  LANGUAGE AS AN AID TO CATEGORIZATION: A NEURAL NETWORK MODEL OF EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 2005 .

[29]  Domenico Parisi,et al.  How can we explain the emergence of a language that benefits the hearer but not the speaker? , 2005, Connect. Sci..

[30]  Deb Roy,et al.  Semiotic schemas: A framework for grounding language in action and perception , 2005, Artif. Intell..

[31]  A. Cangelosi.  APPROACHES TO GROUNDING SYMBOLS IN PERCEPTUAL AND SENSORIMOTOR CATEGORIES , 2005 .

[32]  Ron Sun,et al.  Connectionist Implementationalism and Hybrid Systems , 2006 .

[33]  Angelo Cangelosi,et al.  An Embodied Model for Sensorimotor Grounding and Grounding Transfer: Experiments With Epigenetic Robots , 2006, Cogn. Sci..

[34]  S. Harnad.  Symbol grounding problem , 1991, Scholarpedia.

[35]  Angelo Cangelosi.  Adaptive agent modeling of distributed language: investigations on the effects of cultural variation and internal action representations , 2007 .